Q: How did you come up with the idea for My European Family, and how
did you research it?

A: The idea grew for some years. It was a fusion of two strains.

First, as the science editor of Dagens Nyheter, the leading
daily newspaper in Sweden, I have covered the advancements of DNA technology
for nearly 20 years.

With increasing fascination, I have seen DNA technology
transforming the fields of medicine, biology and forensics, and also archeology,
anthropology, population genetics and genealogy.

Second, I felt an increasing urge to investigate my own family story. Having
been brought up in a small and broken family, I wanted to know more about my
ancestors.

There was a point, some four years ago, when an inner voice was kind of talking to me, demanding that I leave my position at Dagens Nyheter and start to write
the book.
I spent two years doing this. The first year was just spent with research. I
read hundred of scientific papers, travelled to 10 countries, and interviewed
many leading scientists in the field.

Q: What did you learn that especially surprised you, both in
terms of DNA research in general and in terms of your own family history?

A: I was not particularly surprised by the science, having followed the field
closely for many years. My family story was a bit more turbulent than I had
imagined: people going from tenants to landowners to prisoners and again to
landowning farmers in a few generations.

Q: How was the book's title selected, and what does it signify for you?

A: Every word in the title is chosen carefully. "My" because the
story is told in a very personal style, even though it is based on solid
scientific ground.

"European" since it is a story about Europe and its
population history.

"Family" since the book is both about my own
family story, and about the family that we all belong to if we have European
roots.

"The last 54 000 years" since it was about 54 000
years since a little group of people came out of Africa, had some sex with
Neanderthals and become ancestors to the entire out-of-Africa population of the
world, including Europeans.

Q: What do you see looking ahead when it comes to DNA research?

A: Personal tests will become cheaper and more accessible. DNA will become even
more important for genealogy, archeology and history. We have just seen
the beginning here.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: There has already been a follow-up, more focused on Scandinavia, with the title
"The Swedes and their fathers - the last 11,000 years."

A:
In the 1960s and ‘70s, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman were equally as
“important” and “infamous.” When Rubin become an entrepreneur in the 1980s,
there was a backlash against him. Meanwhile, Hoffman was deemed a saint after
his suicide in 1989. Rubin was killed jaywalking in 1994.

In
the decades since their deaths, there’s been half a dozen books about Abbie,
absolutely none about Jerry. It was time to balance it out, but also to point
out that Jerry wasn’t the devil nor was Abbie “perfect.”

Q:
As your subtitle notes, Rubin went from "Yippie to Yuppie." How would
you define each of these terms, and what accounted for Rubin's shift from one
to the other?

A:
In the 1960s, a Yippie was a politicized Hippie! Someone who loved protesting
the Vietnam War and mocking Nixon as much as they loved to get high.

In
the 1980s, a Yuppie was either a young college graduate climbing their way to
the top or someone older like Jerry who had cleaned up their act, gotten
married, had kids and now wanted to make a decent living, have a nice house and
own two cars. Not exactly a crime.

And
for the record, Jerry never became a Republican – he was still a liberal while
being a Yuppie. Why did he shift? For the reasons that I just mentioned.

Q:
How would you describe the dynamic between Rubin and Abbie Hoffman?

A:
Like any good couple, they completed each other. Hoffman was funnier, Rubin was
a better organizer. They were competitive, which worked in their favor
sometimes and screwed them up at other times.

One
thing that many of their mutual friends told me – Hoffman still liked and
respected Jerry during Jerry’s Yuppie phase, even if he claimed otherwise to
the media.

Q:
What do you think Rubin's legacy is today?

A:
In my opinion, there isn’t enough of a legacy and/or a misunderstood legacy,
which is what inspired me to write this book. But for those who knew Jerry,
they remember him as an important kick-ass activist, who used humor to defuse
very serious situations. We could use a Jerry in 2017!

Q:
What are you working on now?

A:
Frankly, I’m still working on this Jerry Rubin book! It took me five years to
interview 75 people, boil that down and catalog thousands of photos, letters,
journals, etc. (with help from my editor Katherine Wolf and others) – and with
the book finally coming out in August, I’ll be spending six months to a year,
crisscrossing the country and promoting it.

Q:
Anything else we should know?

A:
Yes! Jerry did not become a right-winger when he put on a suit, nor was Abbie
beyond reproach in his final years. Both of these guys were, like all humans, contradictory
and complex.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Barry Kalb is the author of the novel Cleaning House. Originally published in 2003, it has been newly reissued. He also has written the novel Chop Suey and the writing guide You Can Write Better English. He has worked for a variety of news organizations, including Time and the Washington Evening Star, and taught for 10 years at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. He is based in Hong Kong.

Q:
Why did you decide to reissue your novel Cleaning House?

A:
The small Hong Kong publishing house that originally published the book went
out of business, and never had the kind of clout in the first place to
publicize the book the way I hoped it would be publicized.

In
the meantime, I had published my second novel, Chop Suey, by myself on Amazon,
and the enthusiastic reception that book has received led me to reissue Cleaning
House on Amazon.

Q:
How did you come up with the idea for this book, and for your character Noah
Archer?

A:
The overriding theme of the book is the overpopulation of the Earth. As a
longtime resident of Hong Kong, I watched China’s population pass a billion,
and continue to grow despite the government’s attempt at population control. India
was close behind. The reality was hard to ignore. But finding a way to write
about it was something else.

A
writer typically reads or hears something that makes him or her think, “That
would be a good theme for a book.” In this case, there were two things that led
to the writing of Cleaning House.

First,
I was reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I came across the
line, “These (laws of the universe) may have originally been decreed by God,
but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them
and does not now intervene in it.” In other words, God created Man and then
left him to get on with it.

It
also occurred to me that the six “days” of creation each averaged a couple of
billion real earth years: in other words, mankind has been on its own for long,
long time, and has made quite a mess of things along the way – including “being
fruitful and multiplying” out of all control.

Second,
I was reading about some terrible act or other in the newspaper one day, and I
thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just do away with all the bad people?

Then
I thought – here’s the writer at work – if we actually could do that…how would
it work? And would eliminating only the bad people bring the population down to
a workable level, or would the cuts have to be deeper? The result was Cleaning
House.

Mass
death is hardly a pleasant subject, so I decided that the book would be a
satire, with a lot of humor in it to offset the main theme.

I
then realized that in order to carry out a plan to eliminate mainly bad people,
God would need someone who knew the politics and idiosyncrasies of the world’s
many nations and peoples.

I
chose for that an unassuming but very knowledgeable risk analyst, the kind of
person who travels all over the world getting to know local conditions on an
intimate basis. That led to the creation of Noah Archer.

Q:
Given that the novel first came out in 2003 and focused on the start of a new
millennium, have reactions to it been different at all this time around?

A:
Not really. I haven’t received that much feedback about the book, but people
who have contacted me generally appreciate both the social and political
commentary, which is still valid today, and the humor, just as they did when
the book was first published.

Bits
of the book are dated – Saddam Hussein is no longer with us – but in general I
think the book holds up quite well.

Q:
Do you have any favorite satirical novels?

A:
I guess my favorite, and in many ways a model for my book, is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
Heller took a real-life situation, World War II, turned it on its head, and
then took the improbable situation he had created to its logical conclusion.

That’s
what I tried to do with Cleaning House: I asked myself, if God decides to
eliminate a third of mankind, and he picks someone to do it with the help of a
computer, how would that actually play out? Which other individuals and
organizations would get involved and how would they react?

There’s
an African priest who believes in birth control and who is accidentally elected
pope. There’s a shape-shifting angel, the Archangel Wong, whom God assigns to
assist Noah. I just let my imagination run wild, and I had a great deal of fun
writing the book.

Q:
What are you working on now?

A:
I have a third novel pretty much written. It’s set just a year after the 9/11
terrorist attacks, but it harks back to the communist era in Eastern Europe and
the Solidarity movement in Poland (which I covered as a Time magazine
correspondent).

The
main character is a man who was a young journalist in Poland back then, who
underwent a terrible trauma, and who, to rescue his sanity, returns to one of
his early passions, the world of wine. The novel talks about how past actions
continue to affect our present (a theme I also explored in Chop Suey).

I
call it “a gripping tale of wine and international terrorism.” I have a couple
of people looking at it, and I hope to publish it later this year.

Q:
Anything else we should know?

A:
Noah’s name is an obvious play on the name of the person God chose to manage
His first housecleaning (Noah’s ark/Noah Archer). In fact, almost all the names
in the book are plays on words.

Most
are just the names of foods – Monsignor Kielbasa (a type of Polish sausage);
Cardinal Guanciale (Italian for a type of cooking fat); Chinese President Tang
Mianji (Mandarin Chinese for chicken noodle soup) – but there are also hidden
historical and cultural references in the names and elsewhere.

The
improbable name of the colonel in charge of ending the mosque takeover in
India, for example, is Ali Singh Patel, Ali being a typical Shi’ite Muslim
name, Singh being a traditional Sikh name, and Patel a common Hindu name: the colonel
embodies Gandhi and Nehru’s ideal of a multicultural India, even as sectarian
violence tears the country apart.

The
book is full of such hidden references, and I enjoy it whenever a reader
discovers one of them.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous Q&A with Barry Kalb, please click here. As far as we know, we are not related!

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Storyteller,
and what do you see as the importance of storytelling today?

A: I came up with the idea while researching for a trip to
Morocco back in 2012. I read a book called The Last Storytellers, by Richard
Hamilton, that talked about the dying art of Moroccan storytelling and its
thousand-year-old history.

When I went to Morocco that fall and discovered that most
storytellers were not telling stories in the squares anymore, I decided to
write this ode to storytelling as a way to talk about that. The form of the
story was inspired by 1001 Nights, and how Scheherazade used stories
to save herself.

I see storytelling as important in many different ways in
today’s world. There is the power of oral storytelling, like in the book, which
is something that really connects us to past generations in a unique way.

But there is also the idea of storytelling in all of our
different media today (movies, video games, books, TV, and even political
campaigns), and how being able to tell a story and captivate an audience is
such a powerful art form. There are more venues than ever for being a
storyteller.

Q: Did you write the text at the same time that you created
the illustrations, or did one come before the other?

A: The text was written before the final illustrations, but
I usually work back and forth on a project, tweaking the text and the style and
content of the illustrations as the story evolves and grows. But there is
always a draft of the text to see how the story will be paced first.

Q: Did you need to do much research to write the book?

A: Research was very important for the book, because I
wanted to make sure the book was accurately representing Morocco, the art of
their storytelling, and the types of stories they tell.

I did a lot of reading of Moroccan folk tales, and tales
from the Middle East that are popular in Morocco, such as 1001 Nights, to try
to understand how their stories were formed and how they flowed.

I also tried to get a sense of how the stories fit into
Moroccan history (with their use to pass messages during French occupation) and
their relevance in today’s Morocco.

Equally important was the visual and experiential research
done in Morocco getting to meet, talk to, and observe the Moroccan storytellers
and carpet weavers, and give the book, its characters, and the stories more
depth.

I also developed the style of the art while on location in
Morocco. I find that drawing on location forces unexpected choices in
art-making, and makes for a more unique, responsive feeling in the art.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

A: I hope that readers take away the importance of
preserving traditions and the power that comes from passing this knowledge and
these traditions down.

One question I always like to ask on school visits is
whether the kids have any storytellers in their own family. I am always amazed
at how many children hear incredible stories from their parents and
grandparents, and I always urge kids to really listen the next time these
stories are told.

It is stories like these that are often never written down,
and if we don’t listen now, they might disappear forever. So I would like
readers to feel the preciousness of that gift.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have a few projects at various stages in the pipeline!
A book I illustrated called Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters,
written by Michael Mahin, will be out in September and I’m very excited to see
that book come into the world!

I just finished the illustrations for my next book as
author/illustrator called Heartbeat. It’s about a baby whale who loses her
mother during the heyday of American whaling in the 19th century, and swims
through the next 200 years seeing how human attitudes towards whales shift
throughout the decades.

In the end, she’s able to find solace in the compassion of
one young girl who hears her song and sings with her, with hope for a brighter
future.

It’s based on the reality of whaling, in that there were
many orphaned whale calves, and that recently some whales have been discovered
to have been over 200 years old! Heartbeat will be out in 2018.

And finally, I’m in the research phase for a book called A
Thousand Glass Flowers that takes place in Venice during the Renaissance, that
will be out in 2019.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I’m so honored to receive the Children’s Africana Book
Award, and thank you so much for having me on your blog!

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Jessica Strawser is the author of the new novel Almost Missed You. She is the editorial director of Writer's Digest magazine, and her work has appeared in various publications, including The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. She lives in Cincinnati.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Almost Missed You?

A: The idea came not necessarily from the book's
premise--which is that a woman's husband absconds with their child in the
middle of a family vacation, leaving her blindsided and heartbroken--but from
its themes: The question of whether there's really such a thing as fate, or an
outcome (romantic or otherwise) that's "meant to be."

I wanted to take a couple who everyone seems to believe IS
fated to be together--their story is a long one of near misses and second
chances--and call everything into question.

We’re all unreliable narrators, to a certain extent, and in Almost
Missed You the characters do discover that sometimes the stories we tell
ourselves are not the whole truth.

Q: You tell the story from several characters' perspectives.
Was that your original plan, or did you change that as you wrote?

A: That was my intention from the start. As a reader, I find
myself more and more drawn to multiple POV stories—they tend to leave me
thinking about things from more complex angles.

Building on that idea that every narrator is a bit
unreliable, I wanted to challenge myself to tell a story in which you would need
all of their perspectives to get the whole story.

Q: The story jumps back and forth in time. Did you write it
in the order in which it appears, or in chronological order for the characters?

A: I wrote the story out of order, always writing whatever
scene was most vivid to me in my mind, regardless of what came next. Some
things moved around a bit in revision, but the overall trajectory is
surprisingly similar to my first draft, given that I wasn’t working from an
outline.

Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify
for you?

A: I love titles that take on a dual or different meaning after
you’ve read the book, and I hope that’s what I’ve achieved with Almost Missed
You.

I hit on the title in the late stages of my revision after
bouncing a few ideas off of my beta readers, and neither my agent nor my
publisher ever suggested changing it.

Jennifer Kitses is the author of the new novel Small Hours, which examines a single day in the life of a married couple, Helen and Tom. Kitses has worked for Bloomberg News and Columbia Business School, and she lives in New York.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Small Hours, and
for your characters Helen and Tom?

A: For me it was all pretty tied together—I had the
situation, I had Tom’s storyline I wanted to deal with. I wanted to capture the
feeling of how much can happen in a single day.

I have twin daughters—they were in preschool, I was
freelancing and trying to take care of them. Going back and forth between Tom
and Helen—that was the kind of life I was living. My husband and I were having
intense days that weaved together. [It’s the idea of] having separate days in
separate worlds.

Q: So you knew from the beginning that you would go back and
forth between them?

A: I had the two storylines, and I wanted to go back and
forth.

Q: How did the idea that the action would take place in one
day affect the writing process?

A: There were constraints because of that. I was checking
train times to my imaginary town. Devon isn’t real but I didn’t want to create
a train that wasn’t there. Even the sunrise time [which plays a role in the
story].

The other part is that I allowed myself the ability to jump
back in time. The backstory is woven into the early chapters. I let myself do that.
For the most part, the story moved forward, except for a few times…in the
middle. You don’t want to let yourself be backed into a corner.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started
writing, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: I think I had a pretty clear idea of it early on. There
was a little back and forth in the revision stage and the editing stage. I had
a pretty clear idea, but I let it stay not specific in my head.

Q: How was the title chosen, and what does it signify for
you?

A: There were at least 50 others! I did want to stress that
it’s not just the time frame, but that each hour is so full. Tom thinks about
his hours being so full, and that his whole life can seem to be going by in the
course of an hour. I was trying to evoke that.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: A big influence in terms of the time frame is The
Sportswriter by Richard Ford. It takes place over a few days. You go through
his day step by step in the present tense.

I also love Tom Perrotta’s books, especially Little Children
and Election. Once you’re in the story, you’re in.

I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout. She’s amazing at putting
you into a story. She’s also amazing with timing. Amy and Isabelle moves back
and forth and jumps around, and you almost don’t notice it.

[I like] Kate Atkinson, especially Life After Life. I buy so
many books. I have ridiculous piles of incredible books. There’s never enough
time.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m in the very early stages of a couple of things. My
early drafts tend to be a mess. The last few months, I’ve been pretty busy
gearing up for this [book launch].

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Q: You've said that you've "always been fascinated with
invisible layers." How did that fascination lead to the creation of You
Were Here?

A: I love the idea that we’re inside a living, breathing
history. That everywhere and everything we touch is full of a life we just
can’t see, and that sometimes we might sense those past stories in ways that
don’t seem logical; a strange moment of pause on a street corner where someone
took their last breath, an unexpected feeling of happiness in a place where
someone said “I do,” or a feeling of loss in a place where someone said a final
goodbye.

I’ve always been fascinated by those invisible worlds that
came before us, as well as with the stories of the past that create our
present, yet another layer.

Everything that came before us forms the platform on which we
stand and I love to imagine how far back that might stretch - whether it’s your
life, your parents’ lives, or even a life you could have lived before.

In so many ways our histories began long, long ago, and it’s
that idea and that fascination that led me to write a book in which one layer
is exposed.

In You Were Here, you see the past, and with that you
understand the history of objects and places, as well as glimpse the components
that shaped characters and their choices, choices that would resonate for all
the years that follow.

Q: Did you know how the book would end before you started
writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: Yes, I actually saw the ending right away in my mind – or
90 percent of the ending. I tend to write that way, coming up with a vague idea
but seeing the ending rather clearly. With that goal in mind, I create
characters who will get me there, but who inevitably take me to many places
along the way I’d not seen coming.

Q: You've noted that research can be a "rabbit
hole" for you. What are some examples of things you discovered that
particularly fascinated you?

A: I had to research World War II for various reasons, and
one thing I looked into were personal accounts from soldiers. I spent days
reading testimonials, simply because I was so interested in them, even though
what I needed amounted to just about one line of backstory. But they were
so fascinating, I just put everything aside to read the words of these
incredible people.

I also spent a lot of time looking up plants, how they
smell, where they grow, just trying to get the seasons and setting just right.

Another things I loved was trying to determine products that
were appropriate and authentic for my past story-line, which involved me buying
a 1947 Sears Roebuck & Company’s catalogue. As you can imagine, I spent
hours pouring through it. Ultimately maybe four products got listed, but I
still have fun with that book.

Q: Dreams play an important role in the novel. How have
dreams affected you, and how did they affect the writing of the book?

A: For as long as I can remember, I’ve had dreams that ended
up coming true. Of course I also have random dreams that seemingly mean
nothing, but dreams have become very important to me because I know they just
might be prophetic.

One dream was key in the formation of this book: When I was 12
I had one of those dreams when you’re you but you’re not you, where you
identify as yourself though you look different, or you know streets you’ve
never actually set foot on.

So I had one of those dreams, and in the dream I was running
through a forest with a little boy, a person I knew was my (actual) brother. It
was during a war. The sky was white and there were leaves on the ground, all
the trees bare.

We were running from something, I don’t know what, and then stopped
at a barbed wire fence. And there, when we turned, was a soldier. Because it
was winter he was bundled up and we couldn’t see his face, but we knew he was
there to help us.

When I woke, I opened my eyes and he was in my room. I
blinked my eyes. And he was still there. I blinked again, and he was still
there. Finally he was gone, and I just passed it off as a figment of my
imagination, or decided I might have still been asleep.

Later that year, my mom decided to take me and some friends
to a psychic for my 13th birthday. While we were there, this woman held my
hands and said, “You and your brother have been brother and sister in a past
life. I see you in a forest, during a war, and you’re running and then you meet
a soldier.”

Of course then I stopped her, and said, “I just had that
dream. When I opened my eyes, he was in my room.” She just said, “I know, he’s
coming back into your life.”

So who was he? My best friend? Husband? Child? I have no
idea, but the idea that perhaps we’ve been here before, that perhaps we’ve
known the people in our lives before, was a concept that stuck with me.

When I was in my 20s, I was still fascinated by this idea,
and I read somewhere you could try and dream of the name of the person you used
to be. Over and over as I was falling asleep, I said give me my name, I want to
know, and then one night it happened: I had dream of a name, nothing else,
repeated over and over.

I’ve never actually investigated the name, since I didn’t
know where to begin – what continent, what year, what anything. But it made me
wonder, what if a character had a dream of a name, and had just enough to go
on? What could she find? In the most basic way, right there, the book was born.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m at work on another novel, but am keeping it a bit
quiet to not jinx anything.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: When I’m having issues writing, I tend to throw myself
into gardening. So one knows, when my garden suddenly looks amazing, don’t ask
me how my writing is going!

Q: You've noted that you spent 10 years working on In the Shadow of the Sun. Can you describe the process?

A: In 2007 I was being interviewed on Radio Free Asia in
Washington, D.C. (about my 2006 graphic novel retelling of a Korean hero
tale, The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea), when the
interviewer mentioned that the broadcast reached into North Korea and did I
have a message for the North Korean people?

Within the month I had an image of two kids on the run, one
of whom could pass and one of whom couldn't. But my first response was that I
couldn't possibly write a book set in North Korea, because how could I possibly
get enough information about what life is like there?

That fall I stumbled on a rare opportunity to view
clandestine footage of the modern North Korean countryside and was amazed to
realize that I recognized it. It looked just like rural South Korea in
the 1960s when I was growing up there.

(Of course it did; the peninsula was all one country the
size of Minnesota just over 60 years ago.) I realized that, with enough
research, I might be able to find my way.

I wrote the first draft during NaNoWriMo 2008, then spent
the next 8 years rewriting — I was also learning how to write a novel, not just
crafting this particular story — all the way to draft #13 (my lucky number)
which Cheryl Klein bought.

Tons of research and assistance from so many people along
the way, including crucial contributions from the seven cultural
experts/sensitivity readers who critiqued the close-to-final draft.

Q: As you noted, you grew up in South Korea. How did that
affect the writing of this novel?

A: I can't imagine how I could have managed without that
experience. One of the issues of writing across cultures is understanding your
own lens as an insider or outsider.

Growing up in Korea I was both, a foreign, high-status
American child, while living in the Korean community, absorbing Korean life and
language through my young eyes and ears, skin and bones.

It's given me the gift of lifelong relationships with close
friends and extended and immediate family who are Korean — including our
daughter — and so many connections within the Korean American community. All of
this informed everything in the book and the process of writing it.

Q: You've written and
illustrated many picture books. Do you have a preference when it comes to the
type of book you like to write?

A: I like to follow the impulse wherever it takes me, into
whatever form. I'm not grounded in any particular genre or age group. Right now
my grandson, born in 2014, is exerting a powerful influence that's inspiring
young picture books, while at the same time I'm getting ideas for older,
longer-form work.

Q: Given that North Korea is very much in the news these
days, what do you see looking ahead when it comes to the dynamic between the
U.S. and North Korea?

A: I hope that we come to our senses and start
listening again to highly informed experts — especially Korean voices — who
understand the complexity and delicacy of the situation and why the DPRK
leadership behaves as it does.

Based on the history of U.S. carpet bombing of the northern
half of the peninsula, when the DPRK was a brand-new country, from a North
Korean perspective it's quite sensible to view the U.S. as a dangerous
threat.

So often we view North Korean leaders as cartoonish
caricatures, to be ridiculed, but if you look at their decisions and actions
from their point of view, they are actually quite rational, focused on the
survival of the Kim dynasty, in many ways a continuation of the tradition of
Korean monarchies.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: This summer I'm completing illustrations for a companion
to my picture book I'm New Here, about three immigrant
children and how they learn to adjust to a new country, language and culture.

This one, called Someone New, is
like a mirror book: it features the same cast of characters, but tells the
story from the perspective of the new kids' classmates and the process
they go through to figure out how to be welcoming.

I've got a handful of other picture books at various stages
of development.

And I'm musing over seven or eight beginnings — everything
from just a concept to casts of characters to 8,000 words in — for possible
novels and waiting to see if one catches fire. I don't know yet if I'm a
picture book writer who wrote one novel or a novelist in the making.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I'd like to recommend that readers seek out Korean voices
on North Korea, especially those who were born and raised in the DPRK before
escaping.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).